


Wake Up Dead

by Defira



Series: Throw Your Arms Around Me (Or At Least Throw A Punch) [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elise Shepard always knew she'd die a soldier. She just never thought that she'd be around to personally deal with the fallout from her own death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake Up Dead

_Just as a man discards worn out clothes and puts on new clothes, so too does the soul discard worn out bodies in favour of new ones._   
**Bhagavad Gita, 2:22**

She was a soldier, and she’d always assumed she’d die in the name of duty. It had been an inevitability, as far as she was concerned, ever since she’d survived the attack on Mindoir. A lanky little farm girl who’d managed to outrun fate- she’d been living on borrowed time ever since, and for a long time she probably would have been happy to accept death when it came for her.

Dying quietly in her sleep had never been on the cards for her. 

But then... then she found that she wasn’t so alone in the galaxy after all. She found friends, and lovers, and she found herself a brother. She found purpose again, and the possibility of love somewhere she’d never considered it before. 

She’d always known she would die, but she didn’t seek it out with such purpose any more. She stopped looking over her shoulder for it creeping up on her unexpectedly.

Her mistake, really.

***

She’d had trouble with helmets and masks ever since the batarian attack on home. 

The emergency masks they’d kept in the house were old, and parts had worn away entirely; no one had bothered to check them in years. She remembered trying to breathe through the smoke of the burning buildings, choking as the filters had failed, trying to claw the damnable thing from her face and trying to run with no air in her lungs.

Breathing in the smoke had been like breathing in a thousand tiny knives, and she’d vomited black for two days. 

Sometimes, when the stress got to her, she struggled with the claustrophobia of her helmets, and she’d invested no small amount of money into visor technology, more than willing to take the defensive penalty if it meant she didn’t have a panic attack in the middle of the field. 

But there were times when a visor just wasn’t an option; in the vacuum of space, she needed a helmet if she wanted to live. 

*** 

It was cold, and it was silent. It was so very different to the last ten minutes or so, so different to the fiery violence that had been unleashed against them. She could hear the air hissing violently as it escaped from the suit, and she could hear her own desperate sobbing, her own frantic heartbeat, but that was all. No explosions, no screaming, no gunfire.

She was alone in the silence.

There were stars above and around her, sparkling lights in the darkness. She was so cold, and each breath seemed a little harder than the last, like there was a little less for her lungs to work with. The glass on the front of her mask was growing foggy... or maybe that was her vision. Her heart was thudding loudly in her ears, but with less urgency than it had moments before. 

There were bright streaks of light out of the corner of her eye and she drifted about slowly to see pieces of metal soaring through the atmosphere of the planet below her. That seemed significant, but she couldn’t remember why.

It was almost peaceful, in a way. It was quiet, and she was sleepy. She could feel her eyelids sagging shut, and she didn’t know why she needed to keep them open, why it seemed so crucial that she keep fighting.

She’d assumed she’d die a soldier, but not like this.

Never like this.

_I’m not ready to die._

***

For the longest time, she simply was. It took her a long time to become aware of the fact that she was, and it was difficult knowledge to hold onto. Self awareness, it seemed, was no easy thing.

She drifted, only vaguely aware of herself, barely more than a consciousness; sometimes she roused enough to acknowledge herself, to wonder slightly what and who she was. Other times she knew that she was warm.

That was usually the extent of her sensory perceptions, and both were remarkably exhausting. 

After what seemed like centuries- but in all actuality could have been no more than five minutes- it came to her in a flash of understanding that something was not right at all about simply being. She was, and she had been for as long as she could remember, but that was not the way of things. She needed to be more, she had to be more, and the sudden acknowledgement of how small her universe was, how limited, sent her into a panic.

It was warm, and she didn’t want it to be; she wanted something else, something more, and she had no words to express what she wanted because all she knew was the warmth, and the darkness, and the awareness that she was. 

But she was afraid now, and her tiny world quaked with the strength of that fear. 

She needed to get out, and the more she thought about it, the easier it was to latch onto herself and stay aware. The easier it was to feel something other than just self, the easier it was to continue to feel. There was panic, so much panic, and anger at herself- she needed to feel more, she needed to be more, and she had no idea how to fight and become more. 

With the panic and the anger came something else- she was uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable, and if she was physically uncomfortable that meant she had a physical form. The implications of that were utterly staggering. 

Discomfort followed, because she wanted to move and stretch and she _couldn’t_. Having a physical form was all well and good, presuming one could access it in some way and she had no idea where it was or what shape it took or how to control it. She was in darkness, somewhere warm and she ached to experience something else. 

In the end, when she did, she wished desperately for things to go back to the way they were.

She felt _pain._

It did not come on suddenly- the discomfort grew with time, evolving into something else, something much more sinister. It kept her centred, at the very least, kept her from drifting off into unawareness again, and pain was infinitely preferable to oblivion in her mind. 

She could not pinpoint it to begin with- that would imply she had some sense of who or what she was, that she had some understanding of the shape she inhabited. All she could say was that she felt pain, a dull sort of ache that radiated through all of her consciousness. It simply _was_ , just as she was. 

The ache became more distracting, sharper even, with the passage of time- it could have been seconds, it could have been decades- and she became aware of other things. She was not always warm, for example- there were distinct fluctuations in temperature, that she had not noticed earlier. She could sense pressure against her, and feel when it changed. 

She could feel her heartbeat, although it took her some time to give it that name. The gentle thud-thud, a sensation and a sound, was as soothing and familiar as a lullabye.

She had a heartbeat. She was _alive_.

Everything fell into place in quick succession after that. 

The discomfort and the pain began to take shape- she could feel an ache in her back, and she had the strongest urge to roll over and see if the ache would fade, but she couldn’t. Her left arm was strapped down, she could feel the restraints, and the sharper pain that radiated along it implied needles at the very least. 

She had arms, and she had legs, and none of them seemed interested in obeying her commands to move, but that wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that she had a body.

_She was alive._

She wanted to open her eyes- she needed to see where she was, who she was. She had spent an eternity in this darkness, lost and alone, and she knew now that she had a way out. She just had to find the strength to reach out and take it. 

It was harder said than done.

Her awareness came and went with her strength, fading in and out whenever exhaustion took her, but it grew easier and easier to keep hold of her sense of self, easier to fight her way towards- hopefully- waking up. 

And then one day... she did.

***

It was a remarkable shock, the moment when she realised she was not simply conscious, but that she was actually awake. Drifting in the darkness of her own thoughts was so very different to lying there, awake, hearing the room around her and feeling the things around her and _dear gods of the cosmos, she was awake._

She could feel the rough cotton of a gown, and she’d been in hospital often enough to know the feel of a patient gown. She could hear soft beeping in the background, and the murmur of conversation- the words meant nothing to her, she couldn’t make them out in any case, but there were distinct voices, several people, and the immensity of that realisation left her reeling. 

There were lights above her, bright enough that she felt the need to wince, even with her eyes fast closed. 

The pain, her ever present companion, resolved itself to specific points in her body, needles and restraints and the awkward sensation of her foot gone to sleep. 

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, she felt like maybe, just maybe, she could control her own body, that her desire to move might actually manifest in movement.

She tried to breathe in, the first time she was conscious of doing so, and found her gag reflex triggered by a tube lodged in her throat.

Her fingers curled slightly; she wanted to reach up and rip the damned thing away from her face, but she had neither the strength nor the control for that. She tried to breathe again, tried not to panic around the device in her mouth, and her eyelids fluttered open.

_Light_.

Gods, but it hurt so badly, and she tried to turn her head to the side. She couldn’t see well- her vision was blurred, everything just vague shapes to hint at what they were. She could see movement though, and shapes that came with rather loud volume settings.

_People_ ; they were humans, and she had no idea what they were saying or who they were- she couldn’t even make out their features- but they were humans and she wanted to ask them what was wrong, who she was and why she hurt so badly and why she’d been alone in the darkness for so long.

But she couldn’t even breathe properly, couldn’t move beyond the faint twitching of her fingers and the desire to retch up the tube in a panic, her eyes struggling to stay open as they came in closer, voices loud and incomprehensible.

It began to go dark again, and she felt her precarious hold on awareness slipping.

_No._

Not the darkness again.

***

“Shepard, get up!”

The voice intruded on her sleep, urgent and angry and accompanied by blaring sirens. It dragged her out of the darkness, and she winced at the throbbing in her head, the pulse matching the shriek of the alarms. 

“Shepard!”

She looked around blearily, and found it easier to move her head. Easier than what, she didn’t really know; she tried to lever herself into a sitting position, and the pain smashed into her like a krogan charge. It radiated out from just below her ribs, somewhere near her stomach, and she rolled to her side and gagged violently, finding herself on a sick bay bed as she leaned over the side and choked up bile onto the floor. 

“Shepard,” the voice came again, female and unfamiliar. She looked up weakly, lifting a shaking hand to wipe her mouth as she searched for the speaker. “Shepard, you have hostiles incoming, you need to get up!”

Shepard- that was her? She was Shepard? Or was she _a_ shepherd, like the job? 

With great difficulty, hand pressed to her side as if that would stop the worst of the pain, she swung her legs over the edge of the table and sat there shivering. Even that seemed like a monumental effort, exhaustion creeping into her limbs and her head pounding. The ground seemed ridiculously far away.

“Shepard!”

“I know, I know,” she rasped, her voice raw and unfamiliar to her own ears. Her throat was dry, and the words sounded awkward in her mouth; talking was apparently a habit that one needed to keep in touch with.

She slid cautiously from the bed, hands clinging almost desperately to the edges- and kept sliding, her feet unable to support her weight. She clawed at the bed, sheets sliding to the floor with her, and she ended up in a puddle on the ground, panting for breath and staring around in bewilderment.

“Shepard, what are you doing?”

For some reason, the anger in the voice roused a similar frustration within her. “What the fuck does it look like I’m doing?” she croaked, her words not quite as fierce as she’d like them to be. She felt tears gathering in her eyes, panic rising in her chest. “I’m doing my best here.”

“We don’t have time for that,” the voice said dismissively. “You need to get up and get to one of the lockers over by the wall-”

“I can’t even walk!”

“Well, in that case, you’re about to die. There are mechs closing in on your position, Shepard, so you need to get up, and get over to that locker.”

She whimpered and tried vainly to climb to her feet; she imagined she looked rather like a baby goat, fumbling to its feet for the first time, too many limbs and no concept of coordination or fine motor skills. Only worse, of course, because baby goats had the excuse of only being a few hours old, and she was a grown woman in a patient gown with no underpants. 

_Danny would find it hilarious._

She frowned for a moment, panting and confused, before memories of a red headed youth swamped her, slamming into her so hard the she moaned and pressed her head to the edge of the bed. Danny, Kidan, brother, engineer, jerk, beloved, friend, there were a thousand things that she needed to know about him, and it all wanted to be remembered at once, in an instant. 

“Shepard!”

It was the only warning she had- the doors slid open with a hiss, and she heard the metallic clink and thud of the mech’s footsteps. Instinct kicked in and she threw herself to the floor, just as a barrage of bullets slammed into the bed frame. 

She was winded, and she hurt so badly, but she didn’t have time to sit and whimper on the ground; she scrabbled onto her hands and knees and all but dragged herself across the floor towards the aforementioned locker. With fumbling hands she managed to prise it open, tossing aside the clothing inside and searching desperately for a gun.

There was a basic Harpy pistol on the top shelf and she grabbed at it, swinging around just as the first mech rounded the corner.

She fired without thinking, her body remembering the habits of half a lifetime even if her brain did not. The mech’s head exploded, and it slumped to the floor in a shower of sparks. 

She stared at it, heart thumping so wildly in her chest that she wondered whether she was going to break a rib. But then another volley of shots flew over her head and she shrieked and ducked down, looking around for the second assailant. 

It was crouched down by the door, and she shot blindly from her cover, shooting until the gun overheated in her hand. Shaking, blood pounding in her ears, she waited for the weapon to stop beeping angrily at her, struggling for breath as she strained to hear any signs that the mech was still a threat. 

Only the angry echoes of the station alarms rang around her.

The pistol fell from her trembling fingers as she collapsed against the floor, her chest heaving in great ugly sobs. She tried desperately to suck in air, but it only hurt, everything hurt, and with the adrenalin fading, there was only hysterical panic and cold clawing fear inside of her. 

“Shepard, you’ve got to get up- you have to get to safety.”

Lying on the floor sobbing and waiting for the darkness to take her seemed infinitely preferable. 

“Shepard, there are more mechs, and if you don’t move, they will find you. Is that what you want?”

She had no idea what she wanted- she had no idea who she was, what she was, what she was meant to do. Her name was Shepard, and she knew how to shoot, and she remembered a boy named Danny. It wasn’t a lot to go by.

“There’s clothes that should fit you in the locker, but you need to get moving.”

Did she want to get moving? Maybe she just wanted to sleep for a little longer, go back to the blackness that was so easy to deal with. 

“ _Shepard._ ” 

In the end, somehow, she found herself crawling over to the clothes on the floor, tugging the patient gown from her shoulders and kneeling naked and shivering on the tiles as she pulled on a shirt and pants.

No shoes, but she didn’t think she had the coordination to manage laces or buckles right now- she struggled badly enough with the pants. She used the wall to help pull herself upright, and stood panting, head resting against the cold steel. 

There was a jacket hanging over the back of a nearby chair, and she grabbed it as she limped past. 

Barefoot, wild-eyed and armed. Whoever she was, she was off to a great start.

***

Her feet were burnt and bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts. There was an oil splatter over her chest that was not going to come out easily, from a mech that had gotten a little too close for comfort. 

And there was blood, her own, but mostly Wilson’s, from when Miranda had shot him only a pace or two in front of her. 

She felt grimy, sticky, uncomfortable in her own skin. Her bones ached, and her muscles were screaming at her, and even breathing didn’t seem to come easy to her.

Worse than all of that though, the memories were crashing in, harder and faster, a jumble of images and smells and faces and sounds. They were so badly out of order, and she didn’t have the space to sort through them. It was a constant barrage, and she sat quietly in the back of the shuttle with her head in her hands, trying to contain the pounding in her temples and the violent lurching in her stomach. 

“You did well back there, Shepard,” Miranda said pleasantly. “I think we can all be pleased with your rapid adjustment to the situation.”

“Please stop talking,” Elise rasped, head sinking lower.

“We’ll need to run some neurological tests when we stop, to see how much- if any- damage you’ve sustained in waking up early. And we’ll need to see if your memory transfers worked correctly."

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she moaned, pressing a hand to her forehead.

“It’s just from the stress,” Miranda said patiently. “You haven’t actually got anything in your stomach to throw up, so it’s just-”

She fumbled to an awkward halt when Elise was violently ill on the floor in the back of the shuttle. 

Jacob was silent for a moment before murmuring “I might have given her a water bottle back on the station.”

The only noise in the shuttle was the sound of Elise whimpering miserably in the back seat.

Miranda sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m not cleaning that up.”

***

Jacob offered to help her walk when the shuttle landed, and she could tell he was slightly uncomfortable with the offer. She waved him off, and did her best to walk under her own steam, but she barely made it down from the shuttle before her legs wobbled and gave out under her. She went flailing towards the ground, grabbing at the shuttle to keep herself from landing face first on the concrete of the hangar.

With a sigh, Jacob crouched down and scooped her up into his arms, his face rigid and unreadable. “The _great_ Commander Shepard,” he muttered under his breath, not looking down at her. “You’d better be damn well worth it.”

It seemed like an insult, but she didn’t have the strength to offer any sort of witty or angry retort.

He helped her from the hangar and through the facility, all but dropping her in a seat when they came to an open room lined with consoles. Miranda had headed straight for one and was busily tapping away at the display; Elise curled in on herself, shivering, as she watched Jacob make a beeline for Miranda.

They spoke in hushed tones, and she could tell that neither of them were happy. Jacob punctuated his words with sharp, pointed hand movements, and Miranda’s body language was cold and unfriendly.

Elise didn’t want to listen; she wanted to go to sleep. She was in a Cerberus facility, watching Cerberus agents bicker over her fate, and she’d lost two whole years of her life. More than that, she was alive, when everything she understood about life screamed that that simply wasn’t possible. 

Death came for everyone, and in death, you moved on. Her jiva, her soul, should have moved on, clothed in a new form. And yet here she sat, shivering and lost, in the hands of a terrorist organisation and clad in the body of her old life.

She felt so ill, so out of synch with reality, that it was a wonder she didn’t just pass out.

“Miranda, she can’t even stand!” Jacob said angrily, his voice echoing through the cavernous room to where Elise sat cringing. “What are you going to do, tell the Illusive Man his four billion credits will just be a little while longer?”

“The Illusive Man has been receiving constant updates on the state of the project,” she responded coldly; they seemed to be unconcerned about her potential to hear them. “He’s well aware that by waking Shepard early we’ve risked jeopardising some of the finer elements of the project.”

“Jeopardising the finer elements? That’s your way of saying she’s a gibbering wreck?”

“She’s experienced major trauma immediately after waking from a two year coma,” Miranda spat back. “I’d like to see you perform any better under similar circumstances.”

Jacob made a derisive sound. “I’m calling the Flynn kid down.”

“She doesn’t have time to see him, she’s going to see The-”

“If you want to send her in like that, then by all means,” Jacob said sharply. “But the fallout is on your head, Lawson.”

Awkward, ugly silence met his words, and Elise wished she could just sink into the ground; she didn’t give a shit about their internal politics, she just wanted to sleep.

Finally Miranda made an unhappy sound. “Fine. Call him down. I’ll tell The Illusive Man that the delay came at _your_ recommendation.”

***

They mostly left her alone, and she liked that. 

She tucked her bare feet up on the chair with her, her head resting on her knees. It wasn’t perfectly comfortable, but she felt less exposed, less vulnerable. Neither of them tried to speak to her, both preoccupied with their own tasks, and she did her best to ignore the tension in the room. 

Really all she wanted was some really strong painkillers and a bed somewhere quiet and dark. 

She heard footsteps, and she looked up in time to see a familiar red headed man come to a halt before her. There was awe in his face, and trepidation, and as she lurched to her feet with tears on her cheeks, she could see that she wasn’t the only one crying.

“Danny?” she whispered, reaching a shaking hand out towards him. 

Her fingers brushed over the back of his freckled hand- he was real, dear gods, he was real- and then he was crushing her to him, his scrawny arms tight around her chest and his head on her shoulder and she was crying so hard she was shaking, but it was okay because he was too.

“Holy fuck, Elizá,” he said, half laughing through the tears. “They did it, _oh my god they did it._ ”

He wasn’t as short as she remembered, she thought- or maybe she just wasn’t as tall as she used to be?- but he had the strength of a hundred men as he squeezed her tight. His presence was like an anchor, the most stabilising thing she’d encountered since she’d woken up.

If her brother was here, it was going to be okay. 

“Look at you,” he scolded, leaning back to give her a once over; he reached up quickly to wipe the tears away from his face. “Most people get the flu for two weeks and lose ten pounds. You were dead for two years and you still came back fat.”

She laughed once, weakly, but her own tears didn’t stop. “Danny, I can’t...” She bit her lip and her head drooped, fighting back a sob. “I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can,” he said, one hand cupping her cheek and the other gripping her fingers tightly. “You’re still my Paprika- you’re still my sister. There ain’t anyone in the universe who can do it better than you.”

“Danny, I don’t even know what _it_ is. I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t... this isn’t me.”

“Hey,” he said softly, his thumb rubbing at her knuckles, “I’m pretty sure that if anyone was gonna know whether you were you or not, it’d be you. But I come a close second, and I’m telling you- you’re you.”

She took a moment to answer, her breathing uneven as she tried to stop the tears. Finally she glanced at him hesitantly, as if she was expecting to see condemnation or pity in his gaze. “You’ve got a scar,” she whispered, reaching tentatively for his chin. Her fingers ran along the angry gash gently. “What happened?”

He laughed and looked bashful. “Some asshole in a bar. Talking shit about you, saying you were crazy. Only one allowed to say that is me.”

“You willingly went to a bar?”

“Well, how else was I going to drink myself into oblivion to try and forget I’d lost the best person in the world?”

She looked knowingly at him. “You don’t drink,” she said, hiccuping around the last of her tears.

“Well maybe I started.”

“Danny...”

“Alright, alright,” he said, putting his hands up in defeat. “Old habits die hard. I was picking pockets.”

She sniffed and rubbed at her nose with the back of her sleeve. “Why were you doing that?”

“Mostly stress, anger,” he said, shrugging and looking away uncomfortably. He didn’t like to talk about his days before he’d met her, and nothing seemed to have changed. He was a little older now, and so much of the laughter had gone from his eyes. There were lines, little creases on his face, that she didn’t remember being there two years earlier. “Plus, you know, I had to make money somehow.”

Elise frowned. “Money? But... the Alliance-”

“Dropped me like a hot potato when I wouldn’t stop causing trouble after your death,” he said with a grimace. “Mind you, I wasn’t exactly doing my best to be the model cadet, but there were people who...” He gestured vaguely with his hand as he sought for the right wording. “People who resented my connection to you; saw it as coasting along on your coattails, so to speak. Between them and the massive backpedalling the Alliance did on the Reaper threat after you were gone, I was glad to see the back of them.”

Everything clicked into place in her head. “So you’re with Cerberus now.”

“What gave it away? Was it the monogrammed handkerchief? It was the monogrammed handkerchief wasn’t it.”

She hesitated for a moment. “Am I here because of you?”

“What? Oh no, god no. As if I could ever be that organised.”

Elise glanced over his shoulder, to where Jacob and Miranda were doing a poor job of pretending not to eavesdrop. “Then how...?”

“Not that I’m privy to the particulars,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, “but Liara had a lot to do with it, so you can thank her when we see her again.”

Liara was alive? Her heart soared at the news, and the question must have been in her eyes because he squeezed her hand carefully. “Most people lived, Paprika,” he said gently. “Twenty one unaccounted for, twenty now that you’re back. That’s a goddamn lot who made it out, given the extent of the attack.”

She breathed out slowly, fresh tears filling her eyes. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Yeah I guess it is.”

“Hey,” he said, booping her on the nose. “You’re alive- you did the impossible, Paprika. What’s a few reapers compared to that, hey?”

She laughed shakily. “You make it sound like it was the harder road, but really it just felt like a hell of a lot of sleeping.”

“But you woke up,” he said, his face serious for once. “And that’s the difference.”


End file.
